I remember learning how simple and pure Makefiles were back in about 2010, and then running into so many bumps that a friend recommended CMake. But usually CMake just uses Make under the hood anyway. I really do like this idea of "build a small, simple, and robust layer, and if it's not good enough, build another layer on top of it." But I do wonder what life would be like if we started from scratch by merging all these layers. Would it be Cargo? Probably not, I doubt it's as flexible as all these layers combined.